Dungeons & Dragons is highly customizable and flexible - a game where rules often take a back seat, but some semblance of balance is important to maintaining player interest and forming a proper narrative. It would be wholly game-breaking if a player were to increase all of their statistics to twenty, and ruin some of the fun of leveling a character alongside their adventuring party. With this balance then comes the concept of power-gaming and min-maxing: players that overly optimize their characters in clever ways to skirt rules or outclass their fellow adventurers.
While there is nothing in the rules against min-maxing, it can be difficult for DMs to deal with one particular party-member who does more damage than everyone else, especially when it upends and unbalances combat. But rather than scaling up monsters and throwing harder encounters at said players, there are creative (and more sure-fire) ways for DMs to help get power-gamers back into a grounded campaign's narrative, and they can also help DMs avoid railroading their players too much.
One of the ways that players can min-max is by taking several different multiclass options in order to gain new features to boost themselves in combat. To fight this particular phenomenon, DMs can require a story moment and character motivation for multiclassing. This leans on the roleplaying aspect of D&D, and can bar players from dipping into a powerful class for no reason. If players want to take a few levels in Fighter (one of the highly abused multiclass options for its Action Surge), for instance, a DM could tell them that in order to do so, they must spend time in a militia or a gladiator ring.
How A DM Can Handle D&D Power-Gamers Without Combat
Another way to handle min-maxing players is to make the challenges of a campaign lie outside of combat. Rather than just testing players’ skill in a fight, skilled D&D DMs can challenge them with puzzles, tricky social situations, and survival scenarios. A player that has min-maxed their stats to do the most damage possible may find themselves on a level playing field with the rest of the party when a DM puts them at a high-society ball, where they must use their Charisma and roleplaying skills to talk to other guests in order to avoid publicly embarrassing themselves. If the party finds themselves lost in a dense jungle, then they may have to use skills other than swordsmanship to hunt for food, find clean water, and build themselves a shelter.
Introducing an overall morally grey tone to campaigns can change how players feel about combat. Establishing the concept that not all monsters are bad, not all apparent villains are evil, and not all apparent heroes are good can force players to stop and think before diving headlong into a fight, thus giving DMs another way to deal with power-gamers by encouraging Dungeons & Dragons players to roleplay. If the party encounters a Hill Giant blocking their path, the DM can tell them that the giant has a child with her, and then push the players to think of a more peaceful solution to their problems.
As always with Dungeons & Dragons, players can build their characters as they wish, but there needs to be some form of communication with the Dungeon Master. Players can always subvert a campaign’s expectations, but if DMs sit down for a zero session with their players, usually they can come to some sort of agreement on what is required from everyone in the group.
